


Wonderful Electric

by nicasio_silang



Category: Iron Man (Comic), Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:02:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What's it feel like when it's...doing that?" She asks. He bends his eyebrows around in a way that still makes her stomach clench a bit, and shrugs. </p><p>"Like fingers, I guess. Fingers running all over my skin."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wonderful Electric

**Author's Note:**

> Ambiguously futurefic, yet more extremis-in-movieverse.

Where the reactor was, there's a dent in his chest so large that she can nestle her fist inside it. The grafted skin is puckered and looks sucked in, paler than the rest of him. He's always tuned his body like a machine, but this thing he can't work away. The space sits in his ribcage, a hole that he can't fill in. She wonders if, when the armor is on, he feels something in the space between him and the suit, in that place in his chest. If the armor still reaches there for its power, even though it doesn't need it. Now the power is in his veins and he bleeds it into the machine while the machine bleeds into him, ending nowhere. Now he carries it inside him, and she thinks it's a wonder he doesn't glow all over, she thinks it's a wonder the skin of his old injury can look so sickly and weak when underneath it he's running on something so far beyond the fallibility of the human body. She knows the Extremis process should have healed it, but he didn't let that happen. She thinks it's a wonder he can still feel her when she touches him.

"What's it feel like when it's...doing that?" She asks. He bends his eyebrows around in a way that still makes her stomach clench a bit, and shrugs. 

"Like fingers, I guess. Fingers running all over my skin." 

The under-armor, the textured golden second skin that cocoons him when he's being Iron Man, is slipping away, dribbling back like liquid, like pixels, into the small openings in his chest, the back of his neck, the insides of his wrists, along his spine, in his temples. Pepper takes a hand off her tablet to chase it, running her fingers down his stomach just behind the tide of it. He rolls his neck to the side and exhales for a long time.

He's just come down from the Helicarrier for lunch and room to breathe. 

Years ago, he liked all those people saluting him and snapping their backs straight as he passed by, but now it tires him out. Now he asks her, like it's a joke, what it is they think they need to salute for. He stalks the carrier halls, grinding out the casualty list with Assistant Director Hill, Pepper with him in her earpiece back on the ground, hearing his voice get louder, betting the salutes go harder, feeling his eyes snap from soldier to soldier, under the mask where no one can see.

"What do we have to eat?" he asks. 

The process is nearly done, and the little holes close up like something natural, a flower folding itself for the night. She always thinks it should make a sound, but it never does. Now he's just standing there, barefoot and naked in the middle of the garage, goosebumps forming on his arms, and her in full business attire from a morning of running the company while he saves the world. She lets her hand rest in the divot of his hip while he wiggles his fingers and toes.

"Last night's buffalo wings and a bag of carrot sticks," she says. 

"Tasty," he says, and she can tell that, behind his eyes, he's looking up takeout menus online like an afterthought, checking traffic to see how long it would take to arrive. 

She glances down his face, past his shoulders, over his torso, past his belly button, over her fingers positioned just so, to the tablet in her other hand, where the schedule in the corner says they have forty-five minutes. She knows he's reading it too, somewhere. He told her once it's like seeing something out of the corner of your eye, but clearly, seeing anything you can think of, as soon as you think of it. She told him to shut up about how amazing he is and look at her, and he did, she thinks he did anyway. 

She shifts in her shoes. Her arches are tired, and he still looks so young.

"You know I hate leftovers," she says. She drops her tablet on the floor where it rattles, battered and used to it, and she pulls at the neck of her blouse like it's stifling. Obliging, he steps closer and begins to unbutton it for her.

"And I hate vegetables." 

He helps her shrug off the shirt and undo her bra; they let them drift down behind her. She skates both palms up his sides, she looks him in the eye to keep him paying attention, she scrapes one fingernail along the soft skin on the side of his bicep and he blinks hard. He plucks out the pencil that was holding up her hair. He starts on the catch of her skirt.

"Yet you used to suck down those disgusting wheatgrass and God knows what shakes every day," she says, and on suck, she bites her lip. He finally smiles and his shoulders drop a fraction. He slides her skirt down and she kicks it away. 

"Little secret from my storied life," he says while stepping them backwards, her heels tapping, her legs under her stockings hot under his hands. "Back in the day, I used to spike the hell out of those. They tasted like appletinis." 

She laughs full-throated, and even more when the backs of her knees hit the cold bumper of the Bugatti and she bumps back onto its trunk, such as it is. He smiles so slowly, and places one hand next to her ear on the car, the other on her hip, skimming his fingers under the lace of her underwear, and leans down to kiss her quietly on the side of her neck. 

"Poor Tony," she says, reaching as far as she can, to the top of his ass, to the beads of sweat in the small of his back, to his cock, velvet at the tip and red and full in her hand. "I bet AA didn't know they'd be such a detriment to your vitamin intake."

"Yeah," he slides her underwear off over her stockings and heels, comes back in for a real kiss, lingering, familiar, and his fingers find her breast, her nipple, making her shake, the inside of her elbow, the wet slit of her pussy. "My life is so totally empty without the booze."

She breathes against his temple, a spot where the gold suit comes out of him, and kisses his hairline, nips her way down his jaw, flexes her hand around his cock until it's seeping and his pupils are so wide, and they're rutting against each other like teenagers. She's sliding against the car's surface, and he's watching something in the corner of his eye so she pulls him closer and guides him into her, hot like glowing steel, she's melting, and his eyes snap back into focus. She's never gotten tired of the way he'll focus, the muscles of his back tense under her hand, he looks at her like something he's never seen before. 

"Pep, you look-"

"Shut up, Tony, we're on a schedule."

He bites her shoulder for that and she arches for him, and they're still moving together, slippery and hard. Fast and impatient. She sees the tips of his ears go red and knows he won't be long, so she slips a hand between them, but he beats her to it, holding himself up with one arm and a knee, denting the car probably, two fingers rubbing at her clit in soft circles, side to side just like she needs, pausing just to tap a staccato rhythm, rubbing again. She knows she just has to twist up her hips more, just has to grip his side and breathe hard into his hair, inhale the smell of him, unchanged, uncharged, not electric, just the long morning and dawn's shower, just their skin together. 

When he comes, he sputters and presses his palm against her clit so hard, just keeps moving, drops his head and sucks at her neck and she's there, she's always right behind him. 

And when they're just messy people on top of a car, mostly naked, precariously positioned, still hungry, with twenty-seven minutes left for lunch, she kisses the tip of his shoulder where he's collapsed onto her, and puts a hand to her own neck. 

"Tony Stark, did you just give me a hickie?" she asks. 

He laughs low. Her hair is stuck to his cheek. 

"What, doesn't it make you feel young again?" He's a bit winded, for all his enhancement. 

She lets her head tilt back and looks at the ceiling. She finds the floor with the heels of her shoes and tippity-taps a few beats. 

"I don't even own a turtleneck," she says. "Did you order food?"

He's tracing lines between her freckles, through the space between her breasts, up over her collarbones, jumping up to the bridge of her nose which she wrinkles at him. 

"Yeah, it'll be waiting at the door," he says. "You like the moo shoo, right? From Point Dume?"

"That's the one," she says. 

Pepper closes her eyes and takes a moment. Tony's heavy on top of her, and in a minute it'll be too heavy, but right now it's comfortable and warm in the wide-open room. His beard is scratching her skin and it'll leave her red like always. After lunch is done, they probably won't see each other until they're both asleep on their feet, brushing their teeth with their eyes closed. She brushes a hand through his hair and down the nape of his neck, where she swears she can feel a pulse against his pulse, something under the skin, humming and electric, but alive.


End file.
